Devices · drives that travel in a bag
One drive is £300 + VAT, and the look that settles the figure is free. Before either, though, there are two suspects. Undo the shell and out comes a plain hard disk, wired to the USB socket through a small bridge board. Those bridges fail by themselves, and most of them hold the encryption keys too, so the unit and its cable both have to reach us. Then add a year of being carried about Nottingham in a bag. Two candidates, and telling them apart is where the work begins.
Ask an engineer, and the first look is free
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| What is happening | What usually causes it | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Drive not accessible, and Windows offers to format it | A cable came out mid-write and the volume now reads RAW, with everything under it intact | Turn it down, then unplug it |
| USB device not recognized, and no name for it anywhere in Windows | Either the bridge or the disk behind it has stopped answering | One spare cable, and then no further attempts |
| Only this from Windows: Unknown USB Device (Device Descriptor Request Failed) | The unit hands Windows no device identity of any kind | A failed bridge. Bench work from here |
| Data error (cyclic redundancy check) when you open it | Sectors are going on the disk behind the board | Pull the plug, and leave it that way |
| RAW or Not Initialized in Disk Management | No readable partition table, so Windows offers to wipe the drive instead | Say no. Initialising is what ends the job. |
| A malfunctioning USB device warning on every port you try | Either the 5V rail inside the shell has gone, or the bridge has | Boards quit long before platters ever do |
Your device picks up a case number the day it arrives, and an engineer then establishes what has genuinely gone wrong — at no cost, and ahead of everything else. Two things come back to you together: a plain account of what can be lifted and what cannot, and one fixed figure in writing. Agree to that figure, or turn it down and pay nothing.
Every one of these begins with the same question: shell or disk? Externals turn up inert week after week, LaCie and Iomega more than most, with a perfectly sound disk sitting behind a board that has quit.
Nobody switched this on; it left the factory doing it. The question is where the encrypting happens — inside the enclosure, or on the drive. On portables the bridge normally does it, so the keys end up on that small board and nowhere near the platters. Take them off the board and what looks like noise becomes your folder tree again.
Nothing is attempted until a sector-by-sector copy exists, taken on a hardware imager; the rest of the job then happens to that copy, and your drive is never touched a second time. Recovered files leave here on fresh media, return postage settled at this end. A surveyor with one set of site photography and a family archive out of a Beeston loft get the identical procedure.
The file list reaches you before any invoice does. Say yes and it is billed; say no and it is not — and on most jobs, if nothing comes back there is nothing to pay. Whatever comes off goes home on media bought in for your case, carriage at our end. Nothing here is closed until you have opened those files on your own machine.
Worth knowing: through 2023, SanDisk Extreme portables at 2TB and 4TB shed files without notice. Western Digital ended up facing a US class action, and the firmware update released partway through settled nothing. A drive of that family behaving oddly should be imaged now, not next month.
The Passport began ticking with nine days left on the deadline. A head stack came off a matched donor, after which the imaging pass was run at a deliberately low speed. On these units the encryption keys live on the bridge board rather than on the platters, so that is where they were read from. References, figures and chapters were all back with a week still spare.
No. It travels as it stands, cable included. Encryption on a portable normally happens inside the USB board and not in the disk, so a healthy disk turning up by itself is ciphertext to us and nothing else. Externals are wanted in their own enclosures on the shipping form in any event.
Never. All that prompt tells you is that Windows cannot identify the file system on there, and it tells you nothing whatever about the files. Agree to it and the structures a rebuild is worked out from get written over.
Moving treats a spinning disk badly: hours of vibration in a van, a great deal of handling at both ends, then a different temperature when it arrives. A mechanism already close to the edge often declines to spin up afterwards. We hear that one most weeks.
Almost always. Three things decide it: the disk, the small board bolted to it, and a bridge chip healthy enough to hand over the keys. What state the shell is in hardly comes into it.
The look costs nothing. What comes back to you is a file list — what opened, what did not — plus one figure to finish the job, in writing, before anything chargeable begins. Most jobs carry no fee at all unless the data comes back. Leave the drive switched off until you have that list.